When Wichita State gathered in the visitor’s locker room at Missouri State, coach Gregg Marshall looked at his players and encountered “some blank stares.” The Shockers were down 18 points. Correction, the undefeated Shockers were down 18.

And it got worse from there.

Gregg Marshall (AP Photo)

After cutting the deficit to 11, the Shockers gradually stumbled and fell back into a 19-point hole with 11:48 remaining. “About 95 percent of the teams in college basketball would have quit right then,” point guard Fred VanVleet said KNSS radio. “At that point we huddled together and said, ‘If we’re going to go out, we’re going to go out our way.’ “

So, yes, the Shockers were conscious of being undefeated. And, what do you know, they still are, because they rallied from that deep hole to force overtime and defeated Missouri State once there, 72-69, behind 22 points from star forward Cleanthony Early and VanVleet’s 16, including seven in OT. It was the sixth-largest deficit from which a team has recovered and won in Missouri Valley Conference play.

With Saint Louis and Alabama already among WSU’s road victims, this game proved to be the most difficult yet. VanVleet had a chance to avoid overtime, but he missed a couple of free throws in the final 2 minutes, including one with 8 seconds left, even though he entered the game as an 86 percent shooter from the line. That the Shockers (17-0) even could reach that position, though, after trailing by so much with such little time remaining, was astonishing.

“We just turned up our intensity, from zero to 100,” VanVleet said. Following Iowa State’s loss Saturday afternoon, Wichita State stood as one of only four undefeated teams in Division I. The Shockers seemed more likely than Syracuse, Wisconsin or Arizona to make it to the finish line with a perfect record because their team retains many of the key components of last year’s Final Four squad and the Valley is not as powerful as the Big Ten, ACC or Pac-12.

Missouri State (12-4) loomed as one of the tougher road challenges, along with Indiana State on Feb. 5, and the Bears proved it with with 10 3-pointers, including five by freshman guard Austin Ruder. The last of those, however, came with 3:54 left and pushed the Bears’ lead up to eight, 63-55. They scored only one more point in regulation.

“That’s a hell of a team. They were ready for us,” VanVleet said. “We gave them way too many open shots in the first half. That’ll get you in an 18-point hole really quick. “It took everything we had to sneak out of here with a win.”

Marshall warned some of us in the media that we were talking too soon about the possibility of the Shockers making it to the NCAA Tournament undefeated. Sure, they’d come this far, and a couple of huge obstacles to that outcome were removed when Creighton took its act to the Big East. But …

“Anybody talking about being undefeated at the end of a college basketball season — I’m not going to say they’re out of their mind, but they haven’t coached a team going on the road through an entire season,” Marshall said. “We anticipate more of these. Hopefully we’ll have the same resolve and toughness.”